Plasmons can be thought of as waves of electrons in a metal surface. More specifically, plasmons are charge density oscillations in a metal or other conductive materials. A light incident on a metal surface can generate plasmons similar to how wind incident on water can generate waves. Light can create plasmons, and the oscillating charges of plasmons can also generate light. The plasmonic-optical interactions give rise to interesting physics at the nanoscale. See also:
What is a Plasmon?
Nano-optics or nanophotonics is the study of light on the nanoscale. Typically visible light is limited by the diffraction limit and cannot be focused down to sizes smaller that about half the wavelength of visible light, less than hundreds of nanometers. Nano-optics deals with ways to overcome this diffraction limit in order to manipulate light at scales that are smaller than 100 nm. Plasmonics is one area of nano-optics. Plasmonic nanostructures can focus light to regions that can be less than 10 nm! Additionally, focusing light to such a small, highly-localized volume also generate extremely large optical enhancements in this nanoscale region. These enhancements can be used for applications including single molecule detectors
[1], enhanced spectroscopies
[2], cancer treatment
[3], and more efficient solar cells
[4].
Research in the Herzog Plasmonic Nano Optics Lab consists of:
See here for more information on these
Research Projects and Areas.
Interested in being part of the research group? See
How to join the Herzog Lab.
Dec 15, 2018 - Herzog group celebrates first PhD Graduates! -
Stephen, David, and Desalegn celebrated sucessfully defending there PhD dissertations at the Arkansas Fall Commencement. Dr. Herzog was able to join them from Indianapolis to hood them all. Well done all, and congrats!
Dr. Herzog, Dr. Bauman, Dr. Debu, and Dr. French.
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Nov 16, 2018 - New undergraduates join Dr. Herzog's group - Undergraduate students at the University of Indianapolis have joined Dr. Herzog's research group. The new
group members are Mile Furr, a sophomore majoring in Software Engineering and Computer Science, and Meredith Magee, a freshman majoring in Software Engineering. Welcome aboard!
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Nov 13, 2018 - David passes his dissertation defense! -
Great job, David! David passed his dissertation defense! Well done!
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Nov 5, 2018 - Stephen passes dissertation defense! -
Well done Stephen! Great job on all of your hard work. You have earned it. Cheers!
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